“We normally have 24,000 residents in the city. Currently there are 3,000 residents in the city and 21,000 scattered throughout the country in over 200 hotels across Israel,” says Kiryat Shmona Mayor Avihai Stern.
Since the early 1970s, the city has become accustomed to being on the front lines of Israel’s struggle to secure its northern border. Kiryat Shmona has absorbed rocket launches from Lebanon, terrorist infiltration and the constant tension of living meters from Hezbollah.But the current war against Hamas changed everything. Hezbollah has joined in the fighting, firing rockets and mortars across the border, and there is always the threat of an Oct. 7-style invasion.
So, for the first time in the city’s history, an evacuation order was given and the residents left for hotels and other accommodations elsewhere. “There were some who left independently to their families,” Stern tells JNS. “But overnight we became a hotel council—an authority spread over 500 kilometers from Kiryat Shmona in the north to Eilat in the south. We were the last to have been given the evacuation order, so unlike the city of Sderot in the south, which was also evacuated and its residents concentrated in two places, we are concentrated in many more hotels. (Read More)
